Notes

Abstract

A PLEASANT surprise was experienced by those who attended the meeting of the Wireless Section of the Institution of Electrical Engineers on November 24 in meeting Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, the veteran inventor of the telephone, who had been on a visit to England and to his old home in Scotland, but is now on the way to his adopted home in the United States. Dr. Bell, who stated that his connection with telephone matters had ceased some thirty years ago, expressed his pleasure at meeting that section of the electrical world which represented the future perhaps more than any other, and referred to the remarkable developments that were being made in wireless telephony, in which the telephone had gone far beyond his most sanguine conceptions of its possibilities. The Times reports an interesting account given at a later interview by Dr. Bell of his researches which led up to the invention of the telephone forty-five years ago. Dr. Bell had long been interested in the mechanism of speech, and in reading of the researches of Helmholtz on the nature of vowel sounds, in a language with which he was unfamiliar, he had at first wrongly concluded that Helmholtz had transmitted such sounds by electrical means. Although he soon discovered his mistake, the idea that a transmission of this kind should be possible remained in his mind, and came to fruition later when he combined two separate lines of research which he had been prosecuting on multiple telegraphy by currents of different frequencies and on recording sound-waves for the benefit of the deaf, and thus arrived at the production and application of an undulating current representing the sound-waves of speech. The freedom of his native city of Edinburgh was conferred upon Dr. Bell on Tuesday, November 30.